With the rapid growth in mobile/wireless and other electronics devices, the battery life becomes an important factor in the success of such devices. At the same time, many advanced applications for these devices are becoming more and more popular. Such applications normally require high performance of components in the devices. Sustainable power is limited by the dissipation capability and thermal constraint. The device or semiconductor chips can malfunction if the temperature is too high. Thermal throttle methods are commonly used in the devices to prevent overheat problems due to the dissipation limitation. One of the issue for thermal throttling is efficiency. The traditional thermal throttling uses generic parameters in controlling the temperature. The parameters, such as the maximum allowable temperature and the threshold temperature do not consider the characteristic of each individual chip. For example, different power leakage results in different thermal-power performance. In semiconductor manufacturing, a process corner is an example of a technique that refers to a variation of fabrication parameters used in applying an IC design to a semiconductor wafer. Process corners represent the extremes of these parameter variations within which a circuit that has been etched onto the wafer must function correctly. A circuit running on devices fabricated at these process corners may run slower or faster than specified and may run at lower or higher temperatures and voltages. While using the same set of thermal-power parameters, the thermal-power performance becomes inconsistent. In some scenarios, the thermal-power control cannot effectively control the temperature within the required range. In other scenarios, the performance of the system is unnecessarily sacrificed.
Under the current one temperature setting policy, the thermal-power performance is not optimized. It suffers potential target temperature margin on the chip, which results in potential performance sacrifices. Thermal-related settings are proposed to enhance the thermal policy.
Improvements and enhancements are needed for chip-aware thermal policy.